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No matter what you do in life (unless maybe you’re a buddhist monk) by systematically using checklists you can eliminate errors and oversights, and improve your results. This is the main premise of the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. He uses fascinating examples from medicine, aviation and even VC investing to [...]

In this post I’m going to explain a nice way of jumpstarting your adwords campaigns using the Adwords Preview Tool. This process will allow you to take advantage of optimizations established advertisers have made over years of running their search marketing campaigns. While this technique can be augmented even further by using paid [...]

I just finished a book by Simon Sinek called “Start With Why”. The basic premise of the book is that in order to create a truly strong organization, you need to determine the “Why” (your reason for existing), from it derive your “how” (it will be achieved) and then your “what” (you will [...]

In this post I am going to describe a technique I have found useful for finding the right sub-contractor for a job with minimal effort. Picture yourself in this situation: you have something you need done & you need to find the right person for the job. Your first step is to head over to Elance or Odesk & post a job description, [...]

In this post I will be presenting a pattern for positioning yourself and your offer as the most important element in the deal, as opposed to your prospect. The objective of this technique is to get the target to chase you, instead of you chasing the target. Here is the pattern: We have one of the better offers in the market. Don’t [...]

What if… …furniture buyers picked up components in flat pack form from a large warehouse and assembled the products themselves in their homes? What is common practice today was unthinkable until IKEA introduced the concept in the 1960’s. …airlines didn’t buy engines for their airplanes, but paid for every hour an engine runs? That [...]

Introducing your big idea shouldn’t take more than 1 minute, says Klaff. Your target hasn’t shown interest yet, so don’t dive into the details. He recommends using a pattern called the idea introduction pattern to generate interest in the target. This pattern was developed by venture capitalist Geoff Moore in 1999. Here [...]

In this post I am going to show a way to reverse engineer Google Display Network (banner) campaigns, to see what other advertisers (competitors) are doing on the Display Network and generate ideas for your own campaigns. The Google Display Network has one of the greatest reaches of any marketing channel, and is a huge opportunity for [...]

A Wise Person knows: When and how to make “the exception to every rule.” When and how to improvise. How to use these moral skills in pursuit of the right aims. Most importantly, according to Schwartz, a Wise Person is made and not born.

In this post I will summarise a couple of the key concepts found in the book I’m currently reading called “Pitch Anything” by Oren Klaff. The book is fundamentally about how the author pitches high value ($1M-40M) opportunities to investors, but I believe the concepts are applicable across many other areas of human [...]